Flagship products from ASR, Kora, Diptyque and The Chord Co. that break the mould and the price barrier.
By Roy Gregory
Prices rise. Inflation sees to that. Things that cost cents or pence in our youth, cost pounds, dollars or Euros now – and audio equipment is in no way exempt from those pressures. In fact, quite the opposite. The relative price of high-end audio components has gone up faster than the elevator in Toronto’s CN tower. Top-end components now cost as much as a very nice car, top-end systems as much as a very nice house. Amongst those high-priced offerings are products that break genuinely new ground and advance the art of musical reproduction. Unfortunately – they are outnumbered by the many that don’t.
Let’s look at two, high-profile examples that are widely accepted to have set entirely new performance standards within their respective fields. CH Precision combined software monitoring, configuration and control of classically simple circuits, an approach culminating in their 10 Series amplifiers. Wadax developed a unique feed-forward, error correction system for digital decoding, resulting in the Reference DAC, generally accepted as a step change in digital performance. Both of these performance breakthroughs took around 15-years of concerted work, along with considerable prior experience to realize. They are massively expensive and well beyond the means of most audio enthusiasts. But it’s performance rather than price that sets them apart.
Back in the early ‘90s, high-end speakers topped out at around $20K (as long as you ignore the Infinity IRS and original WAMM). Most were rather less than that. Wilson’s seminal WATT/Puppy could be had for a little over $10K and set the benchmark. Apogee’s Full Range model sold for around $8K, the Magneplanar Tympani IV a little over half that! That’s when Wilson launched the X1 Grand Slam, a $65K speaker that landed in the middle of the ‘serious loudspeaker market’ like a hand grenade going off. Overnight, the market landscape changed. Within a few years, many high-end manufacturers had responded with their own models at this new, elevated price point – whether their approach, materials and technology justified it or not. Increasingly, audio became a market in which price was no guarantee of performance. We’re seeing exactly the same think happening today…
New year’s resolution…
With that in mind, we are embarking on a series of reviews that cover products in different categories and with very different histories – but all with three things in common. Not only do they come from companies that plough their own distinct developmental path, they represent those company’s flagship products. Each product represents both a different approach and one that’s been taken to it’s logical extreme. Finally, none of them even remotely approach the stratospheric price levels charged for many high-end components.
Over the coming months we will be reporting on:
ASR’s Emitter II Exclusive HV Amplifier
I first encountered ASR’s Emitter amplifier at the Frankfurt Show in the early ‘80s, but the first time I really got to hear it was when it crossed my path, occupying pride of place in Harry Pearson’s Sea Cliff Reference System, probably around 2006 or 7. Now, here it is again, almost 20-years later, still recognisably the same, over-sized yet minimalist offering, with the same huge heat-sinks and acrylic bodywork, large chrome control knobs and bright blue, oversized volume display. In fact, sit this Emitter next to the one I saw all those years ago in Frankfurt and they’d be almost indistinguishable from each other. Not that the two units would actually be the same…
